Speaking of social media and feeds, a new site launched that’s honestly one of the more surreal things I’ve ever seen: Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control. But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconne...

So far the codemods that Juntao Qiu has described are fascinating, but rather straightforward. Real codebases offer more challenges. In this installment , he goes into how to tackle more complicated cases by composing codemods. more… So far the codemods that Juntao Qiu has described are fascinating, but rather straightforward. Real codebases offer more challenges. In this installment , he goes into how to tackle more complicated cases by composi...

What if we… Meet up every Friday when the weather’s good at the park. We can pick a theme each week. For example: Water balloons. What sound does a lemur make? Pie or cake. Bring your own supplies and snacks and drinks. No one has the burden of hosting. Everyone has the joy of community. The rules are: Be kind, have fun, and let your weird flag fly. Let’s call it Feral Fridays. What if we… Buy a bunch of land in one of those big empty states with a lot of land, and we all buil...

We’re pleased to welcome AllSpice.io as our newest sponsor! AllSpice.io is a hardware collaboration platform that serves as an ECAD-agnostic home for hardware teams, connecting engineering design tools with git-based version control and ITAR-compliant hosting along with collaboration, automation, and analytics features. We’re thrilled to have their support! ...

Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 1600 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 1600 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 1600 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 50mm f/1.8, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 1600

Everyone knows the story: Lucy keeps telling Charlie Brown he can kick the football and then pulls it away at the last moment, while Charlie Brown keeps trying because he’s just not very smart. But there are two other versions of the story. In one, Charlie Brown knows Lucy will pull the ball away but keeps trying to kick it because he has internalized everything have said about him and believes repeated disappointment is all he deserves. In the other, he’s waiting for Lucy to grow bored and ...

Ancestry I came across a cool algorithm recently for being able to efficiently answer ancestor queries in a tree ("is x an ancestor of y "). The trick is to assign to each node in the tree an interval [x, y] such that for any node, its children's ranges are contained within its range. It's easy to construct such ranges by doing a depth-first search of the tree and incrementing an integer upon each edge traversal. The integer on the downward traversal becomes the lower bound of the inter...

Hold on, put your pitchforks down - outside of using Grammerly & Emacs for grammatical corrections - not a single character was generated or modified by computers; a non-insignificant portion of my first draft originating on pen & paper. Hold on, put your pitchforks down - outside of using Grammerly & Emacs for grammatical corrections - not a single character was generated or modified by computers; a non-insignificant portion of my first draft originating on pen & paper.

I had a conversation last week with Ben about tools for the next decade of the web. I think we are at an inflection point in the history of the web, one where the tools we made over the last decade or two may not be fit for us in the coming decade. Last year, I wrote in “ The next decade of the web “: My vision for the web over the next ten years is that we can turn that feeling of malaise, which I think is rooted in disempowerment, into a feeling that things can be different. Wi...

I'm going the way of the lazy blogger: by doing a bunch of tag games. I was tagged by a friend on Tumblr to list my Top 9 Films that I'd seen for the first time this year (this was last month). Any way I thought I'd made a "real" blog post about it and introduce the prompt to the blogging world outside of tumblr.com. I don't actually watch a lot of movies so I can only come up with 3 that I could comfortably put on a similar level (rather than just naming 3 really good ones and then trying to...

16 years ago today I wrote up and posted a proposal for a new calendar: newcal.org Having long been frustrated by unnecessary unevenness and other quirks of the Gregorian calendar, I designed and wrote up a more ordered, mathematically simpler, and more continuously consistent calendar. Building up from the atomic calendar unit of a 'day': * five day weeks * six week (30 day) months * two month (60 day) + a sync day bims ¹ * six bim years (minus a day for non-leap-years) After giving it an obv...

Happy New Year! I have a housekeeping message (which you will see immediately below, if you’re reading this via email), a review on 2024, and then some updates about Bits about Money as a publication. Spoiler: BAM is not going anywhere; I’d be obliged if readers supported it with money . Reminder to supporters Are you reading this in a web browser? Supporters of Bits about Money who got this in an inbox saw a brief reminder about billing details. If you are a paying supporter of BAM and ne...

Top 10 ways to monitor Linux in the console top (pictured below ... above is btop ) is the first utility everyone recommends to monitor Linux (or any form of UNIX, including macOS) resource usage. It's efficient, available almost everywhere... but it's also a bit basic. It shows essential metrics, but looks like it's from the 80s. There are ways to brighten it up, like highlighting active processes or changing color schemes, but it's not the only game in town! Nowadays...

Wifi is "it depends" fast. Ethernet is either one or 10 gigabits fast. MacBooks come with very high data rate thunderbolt ports, so why not use them for migration? Turns out this just works. Plug any two MacBooks together with a thunderbolt cable and you get a 10+ gigabit link between them, including IP addresses and everything. This is faster than any other method of migration, including ethernet. I got a new work macbook and I set up the migration from the old work macbook ...

Before we begin, a note that my thoughts are with everyone affected by the fires in southern California as well as by last week’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Xizang, China. The Moon lander duo from ispace Japan and US-based Firefly Aerospace are being targeted for launch by SpaceX on January 15 as a shared Falcon 9 ride to space. Firefly noted on their Live Updates blog that its Blue Ghost Moon lander has been fueled up and encapsulated in Falcon 9’s fairing as of January 10. Tod...

GEORGE and team are officially going to Miami to attended the Miami Science Fiction Film Festival on January 18th and 19th.   If you’re around and want to check out some amazing films including our very own MARY MARGRET ROAD GRADER come on down and check it out at the James L. Knight Center, our film will be showing on Saturday Evening around 6:45 during the shorts program. OFFICIAL FILM FESTIVAL WEBSITE     THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MINIONS OF FEVRE RIVER. ...

When I started making the original Recovery Kit (and admittedly the Recovery Kit 2) I went for the coolest parts and features that I thought fit with the projects. As some of you realize, that also means the build of materials can exceed the cost of a new, boring laptop. A few years back I went about making the simplest possible kit for a Raspberry Pi and created the Quick Kit. I still really like the Quick Kit, and still have a couple of them here in the lab, however I am not romantic about t...

“ The internet is now five websites owned by three people and all of them are awful” they said on yet another social media platform where they posted more than a thousand times already and it’s doomed to become the sixth websites. This is part two of an ongoing series apparently. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: ...

1Crossword: crosswords for your password manager I made a game. It's called 1Crossword. It generates crosswords using the passwords in your 1Password vault. The crosswords are fun, simple, and perfect for sharing on social media once you complete them. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/1Crossword 1Crossword: crosswords for your password manager I made a game. It's called 1Crossword. It generates crosswords using the passwo...

Almost all of academic science has moved away from actual (empirical) science. It is higher status to work on theories and models. I believe that it is closely related to well documented scientific stagnation as theory is often ultimately sterile. This tendency is quite natural in academia if there is no outside pressure… And is the main reason why academia should be ruthlessly judged by practitioners and users. As soon as academia can isolate itself in a bubble, it is bound to degrade. It...

Slide in Lev Reyzin 's JMM talk "Problems in AI and ML for Mathematicians" Reyzin is paraphrasing Telgarsky. Posted with permission. Last week I attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle with a theme of We Decide Our Future: Mathematics in the Age of AI With little computational complexity in the conference, I attended many of the AI talks. You could divide them into Math for AI and AI for Math. Mathematics of course plays critical roles in machine learning optimization, and several t...

If you’re building a new Python web app these days, there’s a good chance you’re using FastAPI. There are a lot of features that make FastAPI easy to get started with. There are also a lot of nuances that take a while to understand. One feature I’ve been untangling is the way FastAPI manages calls to API routes via decorated path parameters. The new year is a perfect time to take a deeper dive. What happens in a web server When we build a web app, one of the critical components is ...

Automatic Differentiation (AD) is an important algorithm for calculating the derivatives of arbitrary functions that can be expressed by a computer program. One of my favorite CS papers is "Automatic differentiation in machine learning: a survey" by Baydin, Perlmutter, Radul and Siskind (ADIMLAS from here on). While this post attempts to be useful on its own, it serves best as a followup to the ADIMLAS paper - so I strongly encourage you to read that first. The main idea of AD is to treat a ...